The Physical Preparations

Standing at 5 foot 4 inches tall and with a natural bodyweight of just 8 stone (112 lbs), I realized that I was mechanically facing tough odds. Rowers are usually tall, powerful athletes as this allows them to get a bigger reach with the oar and move it through a greater body of water, therefore creating greater movement and speed.

To make up for my lack of size, I focused on developing physical endurance through training.

The success of an endurance athlete is founded on one fundamental principle - the ability to keep supplying the body with enough oxygen that the exercising muscles (including the heart - the 'cardiac muscle') need to maintain their function. So if we think about a sport like rowing - the body has an incredibly demanding and daunting task simply because there are just SO MANY muscles involved. Rowers are constantly engaging (i.e. contracting and relaxing), their leg, back, arm and shoulder muscles - and also the heart that is frantically trying to supply the all these muscles with blood packed full of oxygen.

In short, big lung capacities equals more oxygen given to the blood flowing through them which then goes on to that efficient hydraulic machine, the heart, where it is pumped around the body to, for example, the rower's exercising muscles.



If you would like further information on how the heart and lungs function a great place to start is the two websites listed below, the second of which provides an interactive guide to the structures and actions of the heart and lungs:

The Heart and Lungs

An Interactive Guide to the Heart

So with this in mind, I had a training and racing plan for the Atlantic voyage that encompassed the following features:

1. Develop my ultra-endurance aerobic capacity for rowing

2. Careful maintenance of both the body and the mind (to avoid wear and tear)

3. Supply my body with the appropriate nutrition (the fuel) to get me over the Atlantic.

To put it simply, my key training mantra was sustainability.
Training for the Atlantic Race:

I used a Suunto T6 heart rate monitor to gauge the intensity of my workouts. This impressive piece of kit allowed me to download my workout to my laptop for analysis. It measures 7 body parameters - EPOC, training effect, oxygen consumption, energy consumption, respiration rate, heart rate and ventilation - to indicate whether my training is having the desired effect.

April - May 2005

I initially sacrificed dedicated endurance training time for an equally important requirement - ocean knowledge. For 5 weeks, I partook in 'Ocean Familiarization', which involved sailing on a 38-foot yacht with a crew of four in the Eastern Atlantic. This valuable experience established 3 important facts:

1. Seasickness doesn't last forever (although it may feel like it!). After a couple of days of feeling like a wrung-out dishcloth, I found my sea legs.

2. I was able to cope with being on a small boat out of sight of land.

3. I was able to cope with being alone on deck during night watches without getting scared.

Summer 2005

Having built up a good base of endurance through long hours on the 'ergo' (rowers' slang term for an indoor rowing machine), I shifted my training focus to increasing strength, power and cardiovascular fitness (rowing is a rare sport that requires a blend of both endurance AND power to propel a boat across the water as fast as possible). This was achieved by training with weights and completing shorter more intense workouts on the ergo.

An example of one of my sessions, a 30 minute 'Pyramid session' is shown below:

5' warm-up @ 120 bpm
4' rating 24 @ 145 bpm
3' rating 26 @ 155 bpm
2' rating 28 @ 165 bpm
1' rating 30 @ 170 bpm
And back down again.

(Key: ' = minutes and bpm = beats per minute or heart rate)

Autumn 2005

During September the training became more sports-specific, more closely emulating the physical challenges that I expected to face during the race itself.

Every Sunday during this period I was rowing for 16 hours, performing the task in shifts of 3 or 4 hours (in a similar way to which I rowed the Atlantic). It was crucial to keep a heart rate of around 100 bpm. This way the body would always have enough oxygen pumping around the body and more importantly allow me to sustain my rowing for long periods  of time. This not only trained my body to cope with the Atlantic but also my mind to deal with the psychological challenge of boredom that I would encounter during times of prolonged isolation and fatigue.

But this is only half the story... Now go to the Nutrition page.